THE CHALLENGE OF ATOMIC ENERGY
EINAUDI, MARIO
WRITERS and WRITING THE NEW LEADER LITERARY SECTION The Challenge of Atomic Energy Reviewed by MARIO EINAUDI FEAR, WAR, AND THE BOMB, Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy. By P....
...The German Jew: Always in the Middle Reviewed by ANATOLE SHUB THE SORCERERS...
...the other is a gay seducer...
...The figures Blackett uses to prove the greater interest of the U.S.S.R...
...NOTWITHSTANDING these shortcomings, the book is a failure on a high plane...
...But Blackett refuses to see this responsibility...
...A novel whose characters are vivid, unique indi"* viduals is usually labelled "autobiographical" today...
...A novel by Rudolph Kieve...
...it is, after all, interesting throughout...
...What's wrong with Rudolph Kieve's "The Sorcerers," a serious first novel about Jews in Germany during the First World War period, is precisely that it is authentic, "modern, und continental...
...The fact remains that the day when atomic power will be available is not near, and that Europeans and Russians would die of starvation and cold if they had to count on atomic power for their deliverance...
...NO LESS REMOVED from the observable facts are certain of Blackett's political views...
...his son, the fledgling Nazi...
...Kieve has tried to do is to weave them all together into a distinct fabric, that fabric being the disease that afflicted Germany long before Hitler and of which the man with the mustache was the end-product...
...There is no justification for Blackett's belief that the proposed international atomic cue: gy authority would not .become just that, or that it would not become a valid instrument for the reconciliation and satisfaction of the legitimate and peaceful requirements of all peoples...
...But when he also underrates the future increase in the destructive power of atomic weapons and fails to take into account the instinctive and paralyzing fears of the peoples of the world in the face of the new danger, he completes a picture of the military consequences of the bomb which to the layman appears to be wildly optimistic and wholly at variance with the opinion of those who have been directly and continuously concerned with atomic weapons...
...More could certainly be done, were it not for the state of fear and uncertainty for which Communism is largely responsible...
...But when the people of a story slip conveniently into mental grooves, we call the' novel "authentic...
...But his threads are loose, and the final product is, understandably, woolly around the| edges...
...The blend of sociology distilled in psychoanalysis, he is a boresome variation of a too familiar stereotype...
...In doing so, Blackett not only misunderstands the nature of a free society expressing itself with a variety of opinions, but also imputes cynical and sinister motivations to the United States which are not justified by any reliable evidence...
...Kieve seems to conceive of as a Jewish Trinity...
...But the fact is that that "consolidation," in complete defiance of Allied agreements, had already been substantially completed well before Hiroshima...
...And when n novel rambles through interminable conversations, irrelevant observations, and random ruminations, we call it "continental...
...The central figure of "The Sorcerers," Albert Sulzberger, is the schizophrenic member of what Mr...
...THIS CONSISTS IN THE construction of a \ holly imaginary Russian ease with regard to atomic power...
...Albert, a moody, frustrated, and indecisive intellectual, stands just about half way between the two...
...If one country has been power-hungry in the last ten years, it has been the United States, where the increase in power production has been without parallel in the world and where the pressure for more power from all sources continues undiminished...
...The simple way in which Blackett dismisses the terrors of atomic bombing is hard to understand, for lie disregards the immensity of the problem caused by radioactivity, or by the saturation of any country's defenses attained through the concentrated delivery of atomiic explosives...
...438 pages...
...THE MAIN FASCINATION OF Professor Blarkctt's book lies in its quite novel estimate of the current military and economic significance of atomic energy...
...LET'S FACE IT...
...Albert's story alternates, almost contrnpuntally, with the doings and thoughts of the other principal characters...
...Blackett docs not explain why, pending the arrival of that still Utopian day, Russia, blessed by an abundance of coal and water, should not attempt to satisfy her hunger by exploiting the cheap and known methods of production of powei from those sources...
...Houghton Mifflin...
...And novels which consciously follow Freudian patterns too often give us types rather than characters...
...That this should be true of a most distinguished scientist is disturbing, even though it leaves one mentally prepared for the way in which Blackett presents the second major thesis of the book...
...Blackett believes that the military value of the bomb has been obsessively exaggerated by American military thinking and that it: final power to win wars cannot be accepted, as shown by the negative results of Allied bombing of German industries and cities in World War II...
...No one doubts that we have merely begun the task and that the Russians may have the right to see moie clearly into a number of important issues befu...
...Presumably, our imagination must at this point envisage David E. Lilienthal, the notorious stooge of the "business-managed" electrical industry, leading this inhuman plot of monopolistic America, and determined to eliminate any new competitive threat to its well-established and powerful public utilities...
...The ultimate tragedy of Blackett and of those who follow him lies in their failure to see the truly revolutionary nature of the proposal to vest in a supernational agency the effective control of atomic energy...
...244 pages...
...By trying to force- our thinking back into narrower channels and by calling "hysterical anguish" what might be a providential awareness* by man of the new age- opened by atomic energy, Blackett has done a serious disservice to the cause- of the advancement of human institutions...
...But Mr...
...For the record, the plot: Albert thinks he can work with the Junker, learns he really can't, and (in good Toynbee spirit) withdraws and returns in the bright grey dawn of a passive relativism, his doom staring him in the face...
...Throughout the military discussion we are given the impression of someone who has not maintained very close ties with the world of atomic scientists and who relies on deductions drawn from the experience of Ihc air offensive against Germany which are not all relevant to the problem at hand...
...What Mr...
...He writes, for instance, that the possession of atomic bombs by the United States is "sufficient" motive for the consolidation of Soviet power in eastern Europe...
...Having dramatized a few entirely ihctorical anil commonplace utteiances by Gromyko on the wide peaceful horizons opened by atomic energy, Blackett maintains that one of the mam i casons why the Soviet Union cannot accept the United Nations control plan is that it would undoubtedly fail to satisfy Russia's atomic power requirements...
...No one would bo able to reject the rightful claims of the undeveloped areas of the world to the use of atomic power, least of all the United States which have taken the leadership in the battle to raise the standards of living of mankind...
...The trick is achieved largely by transforming isolated voices into the voice of America...
...and a number of those kindly old German intellectuals whoso speeches are as long as doctoral theses and usually just as uncnlightening...
...We have so often seen history stood on its head by Soviet spokesmen, that we are no longer surprised by their monotonous practice of reversing historical processes...
...the other is from start to finish completely independent of his Jewish origin...
...of situations that are symptomatic, not self-consciously symbolic and in a style that illuminates, iattic' than imitates, the paralyzing uncertainty of our age...
...There is also ample evidence to prove that the United States Atomic Energy Commission is doing all it can, under the present circumstances, to speed to the utmost the processes which will make the production of atomic power feasible...
...The first brother ignores sex...
...in the development of new sources of energy are incomplete and misleading...
...Somehow, this picture is not a persuasive one...
...Price $3.50...
...Atomic energy offeis a great chance and challenge to depart radically from traditional political and economic solutions and to start breaking the shackles of national sovereignties...
...Kieve will write of people as he knows them, not as he understands them...
...By P. M. S. Blackett...
...AROUND ALBERT and his family move a number of other recognizable inmates of the European literary menagerie: the cold, arrogant Junker...
...but it comes as a shock to find the same procedure adopted by a scientist who in his own field would never be guilty of such violence...
...In charting the future policies of Russia find America, the one as cruel and ruthlessly calculating a dictatorship as has ever existed, the other a country which has so far made a fetish of its rejection of power politics and has often shown incredible innocence in its foreign affairs, Blackett in effect finds the latter guilty of dark designs upon the future happiness of mankind...
...These two factors alone would appear to invalidate to a large extent the tables of equivalence between atomic and conventional explosives given by Blackett...
...One of his brothers lives up to the primeval traditions of the race...
...ONLY BY LIFTING the issue ol atomic energy to a supranational level can we hope to break down national monopolies, rigid political systems and the oppressive secrecy bthind which Russia has repaired...
...Some of the latter, incidentally, are better done than the main theme...
...Anatole Shub is assistant editor oi the New Leader...
...But no one who has 111.night about the matter at all has faili d to see that the hope of the futuie lies in the assumption of real power* by an agency representing the conscience of mankind and made gradually stronger than any nation...
...WE MIGHT FORGIVE the incessant philosophizing and the dreary uncertainty of it all if there were a few live characters in the book to stand above the morass of rationality...
...What Blackett conjures up is a conspiracy of power rich United States against power-hungry USSR., as well as visions of "shivering citizens" and "unemployed workers" of Europe begging in vain for atomic power to relieve their plight...
...He is also convinced of the American determination to relegate to a aistant iuiuie the industrial development of atomic power, a determination which runs against the fundamental interests of the Soviet Union...
...Price $5.00...
...various women in varying states of lechery...
...Kieve, unfortunately for his novelist's avocation, is a psychiatrist by trade...
...Mario Einaudi is Professor of Government at Fordham University...
...e accepting the United Nations pl.in...
...He is thq present of Jewish young manhood as mucin as his brothers are, respectively, the past and a wistful futuie...
...And when a long novel leaves us with no deep fueling one way or the other, but only a flat taste in the mouth, we call it "modern...
...New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1949...
...In his next novel, we hope that Mr...
Vol. 32 • March 1949 • No. 12
